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> Life is complicated, but in general humans have been becoming much more respectful of the environment as we become more wealthy. [...]

You can't be serious... https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*IOUIWy_MZuECIpZRK... ("The Great Acceleration")

Also read The Anthropocene Review whenever you feel too optimistic about the future.

In fact now that I read your comment again, there's virtually not a single statement I can agree with.

Our current way of "householding" ("economy (from Greek οίκος – "household" and νέμoμαι – "manage")") with this planet is thrashing ecosystems left and right. This is because mankind's economy has long taken on a life of its own, serving itself, without anyone pricing in "negative externalities" (another way of saying we're turning Earth into a Wall-E-esque dystopia, except we're not going to have a big space station to live on).

None of those charts are normalized per capita, so they're essentially just plotting population growth.

I agree with you that greenhouse gas emissions are disproportionately from high-income countries, along with meat consumption, food waste, air travel, and lot of other measures. But those charts aren't a great way to make that point.

I recommend Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now for a data/evidence-driven case for optimism on the environmental front. Still plenty of cause for pessimism/alarm, but reason for hope as well. As societies progress beyond poverty they expand their circle of concern beyond immediate survival to their surrounding environment. In fact this entire discussion is part of that expansion.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/jeremy-lent/ste...

It's fair to say the wealthier society has become, the more respectful it has become of the environment. It's just that with greater capability comes greater capacity to do harm. Prehistoric humans probably had a limited concept of environmental protection, but it didn't matter--there wasn't much they could do to it.

Given the unpredictability around both environmental respect and capacity for destruction, together with incentives from person to person to act or resist, it's difficult to predict much with certainty.

"there wasn't much they could do to it"

This is not really true. Humans have been radically changing the environment from before they were even "Homo Sapiens".

For just one example, prehistoric human hunting had devastating effects on animal populations with most large mammals killed off by humans every time we moved into their habitat. We even have a couple of data points when this happened very quickly. In Australia around 50k before present (BP) and in the Americas around 10-15k BP. From this[1] Atlantic article).

"By looking at how mammals have changed in size over time, Smith and her colleagues have shown that whenever humans are around, the mammals that disappear tend to be 100 to 1000 times bigger than those that survive. This isn’t entirely new: Many scientists, Smith included, have found the same trends in Australia and the Americas. But the new analysis shows that this pattern occurred in every continent except Antarctica, and throughout at least the last 125,000 years."

And the abstract of the paper this article is writing about [2]

"Since the late Pleistocene, large-bodied mammals have been extirpated from much of Earth. Although all habitable continents once harbored giant mammals, the few remaining species are largely confined to Africa. This decline is coincident with the global expansion of hominins over the late Quaternary. Here, we quantify mammalian extinction selectivity, continental body size distributions, and taxonomic diversity over five time periods spanning the past 125,000 years and stretching approximately 200 years into the future. We demonstrate that size-selective extinction was already under way in the oldest interval and occurred on all continents, within all trophic modes, and across all time intervals. Moreover, the degree of selectivity was unprecedented in 65 million years of mammalian evolution. The distinctive selectivity signature implicates hominin activity as a primary driver of taxonomic losses and ecosystem homogenization. Because megafauna have a disproportionate influence on ecosystem structure and function, past and present body size downgrading is reshaping Earth’s biosphere."

Human started wild fires would be another.

Humans changing life on Earth is as old as humanity but the last few hundred years is the first time we have started to care at a societal/global level. National Parks were being form in the US starting in the early 1900's. Half of Alaska was preserved in the 1970's, many countries in Africa are doing the same. If those African countries can get rich enough, fast enough some of the great savanna ecosystem could be kept from extinction. As usual, a balance of going forward and preserving what we have will be the best bet for a good outcome. It does not seem that having radical groups of people holding opposing views works well to maintain this balance. Maybe each individual needs to see the value in change and stability for good things to happen more than bad. Moloch[1] is always with us but its power can be reduced from time to time.

[1]https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/in-a-few...

[2]http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6386/310

> Great acceleration chart

OP's point is a bit more complex. Per capita, humans became a less respectful on initial industrialization (and initially wealthier), but become more so as they become wealthier. Probably the worse is at a middle-income point (maybe $5k/capita)

This is why forested acres have gone up significantly in the US and Europe: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...

"Life is complicated, but in general humans have been becoming much more respectful of the environment as we become more wealthy." - This is highly reductive and untrue. Increases in wealth directly correlate to higher rates of consumerism and more resource intensive diets. Just because wealthy countries are talking more about environmental degradation, doesn't mean they are making significant strides to reduce impact. Take the much talked about environmental agreements that pop up every other decade for example. Both the Kyoto protocol and now the Paris Agreement have done little more than pay lip service to the fact the environmental destruction is an existential threat to humanity. Both international agreements were non-binding in their terms and had exceedingly unambitious goals to reduce pollution and waste (as relates to avoiding detrimental increases in temperature and collapsing ecosystems.'

"The other alternative really boils down to a belief that it would be best if humans weren't around." - This too is overly reductive and amounts to nothing more than a straw man's argument. Are you to suggest that the only way to reduce pollution and environmental impact is to get rid of people entirely? How about tightening emissions standards, banning/taxing destructive materials like plastic, putting immense taxes on dirty energy? All of these measures are oft talked about, half-heartedly implemented for the most part, and could do much to reduce our impact all without addressing the population (not that that isn't an issue in and of itself.

The problem with the argument that we should just plow ahead full steam, hope that we can technologically solve our way out of the problem, and then clean up the mess afterwards is that we don't actually know if the problems will be solvable in a couple of decades when the time arrives. We simply don't know if this will work and the further destruction that happens in the meantime will make the challenge all the greater. For example the risk of armed conflict due to resource scarcity or famine (look at Syria right now) or the unforeseen consequences of fully collapsed fisheries and desertification of farmland is a very real one, and should be viewed as a direct danger of climate destruction. We do know, however, that taking extreme measures to reduce emissions and our environmental impact in the present will make this problem easier to solve. I simply don't understand how some find it valid to respond to such an impending risk with nonchalant suggestions that we'll simply solve this one later.

Complex problems can't be well discussed in such a short form. I don't really have time to create a full steelman argument.

I think that the "we should just plow ahead full steam" part of humanity started loosing power in around 1970 (I agree we were probably getting a bit too powerful too quickly and a slowdown was a good idea). The "safety first" part of humanity began ascending and has taken over most of the powerful institutions. Some swing back the other way is needed. Seems like life must go in these destructive/rejuvenating cycles and that a steady state of goodness is not really possible.

I disagree quite strongly with what I take to be both of your main points. I am genuinely under the impression wealthy humans are responsible for a disproportionate amount of environmental destruction. We consume more of everything that contributes to deforestation, pollution, and plastic waste.

I also do not believe the alternative that it would be best if humans weren’t around. I agree with the other commenter that that is a strawman. I believe humans can and should look forward to a better world where we use technology to meet our needs more efficiently. I absolutely do not suggest we “slow down” technological advancement. At the same time I instead insist that we must be conscious of the effect we have on the world. Technology will not automatically solve our problems. It will be our choice not to buy single use plastics, not to consume meat, and not to purchase novelty goods that would soon end up in a landfill.

I advocate for a future where technology is developed by groups of people who want to thrive together while also reducing our impact on the world. We cannot allow ourselves to believe that technology alone is enough, we must change our culture to be less wasteful.

In full agreement.

>I disagree quite strongly with what I take to be both of your main points. I am genuinely under the impression wealthy humans are responsible for a disproportionate amount of environmental destruction. We consume more of everything that contributes to deforestation, pollution, and plastic waste.

Just look to the company hosting this site...

I've flown once since Y Combinator came into existence, Y Combinator requires at least 1 founder of every team that gets an in-person interview to fly to the Bay Area.

CO2 emissions from aviation fuel are 3.15 grams per gram of fuel.

>a round-trip flight from New York to San Francisco emits about 0.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio...

YC has funded 1500 something companies funded, let's assume they've interviewed twice that many in person.

So let's say 0.7 metric tons x 3000 companies x 1.5 cofounders, that's 3150 metric tons for in-person interviews.

Now, let's look at data transfer for skype. Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of >Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2, based on the usual U.S. electric mix

https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/carbon-and-the-cloud-d6...

Skype, with HD, could use

>Recommended Video Call HD 10.98 MB/min

https://www.orduh.com/data-usage-on-skype-video-call/

Assume 15 minute average interview.

165 megabytes x 3000 companies = about a ton of carbon IF the data is stored for a year so in reality a fraction of a ton.

So an investment company, looking to invest in businesses that ideally will hit a billion plus valuations, could have easily used 3150x more carbon because they can afford to reimburse flights and would prefer to do interviews in person where video chat would have not only cost orders of magnitude less but generated thousands of times less carbon.

Now consider the more money you have, the more likely you are to travel regularly for recreation and here is a clear case where more $$$ can easily result in a considerably larger carbon footprint.

People care more about conservation as their wealth rises, so yes, in some senses advancing the economic wellbeing of the world could be a strong lever for the future. But we do need to avoid making the place a wasteland in the meantime, or there will be nothing left to save.

>> humans have been becoming much more respectful of the environment as we become more wealthy.

The wealthy generate the most pollution[1]. Also, Native Americans, the most environmentally respectful humans I can think of, were not wealthy.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachm...