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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

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I think technically you are correct. The earth could become essentially a farm, with a bunch of giant monoculture croplands that provide feed, oxygen, mulch, etc.

The downside is that the lush, unfathomable nature documentaries of the present will be a curiosity from the past.

But there is a pretty large population of humans who is already on board with something quite close to this transition. They live between farms and ranches deserts and cities and don’t see nature as anything but raw material to groom.

So I think your sarcasm is misplaced.

We need a real story for those people. Why should they care that everything over a kilogram could go extinct and ConAgra become responsible for seeding formerly wild spaces with geo-engineering products that maximize economic growth?

But money itself is made of plant-based matter, so the plants have snuck their way into the heart of our economy. It's almost as if they knew about job security.

What it is to do with capitalism? Are (existing or former) communist states better to wildlife? Do you have any facts?

I feel like capitalism here was used in place of the current regime

Capitalist systems give power/status/wealth to those who generate the greatest profits, and none currently in existence price the costs of environmental exploitation. They therefore incentivise environmental destruction.

You could in theory (if capitalists weren't so opposed to regulation!) price these things into a market, but it is unclear that it is a good idea to do so. You are effectively setting up a world-view based on money/profit being the only motivating/guiding factor, and then trying to blacklist certain things within that by artificially changing their monetary value. It might well be better to build ethics into the system from the start, rather than trying to map ethical value to monetary value, which is almost certainly doomed to be an imperfect mapping in practice, and implicitly gives people the "ok" to exploit any loopholes they can find.

Ive been to ex “2nd world countries. They’re attitude towards the environment was a bit more man vs nature than what we see in the West. See the gigantic sometimes failed exercises in diverting rivers building dams etc. one of the more spectacular examples is the Aral Sea, connecting the Arctic rivers and in China the three gorges dam... which while a twinkle in Yatsen Sun’s eye, became a windmill in Zedong Mao’s policies, and finally realized by the current regime.

I think we need to get out of this "capitalist" vs "communist" mindset. There are not just two economic possibilities: "everything is an unregulated market" and "everything is top-down planned".

There exist possible future economic systems which use markets where appropriate. Centrally plan where appropriate. And regulate where appropriate.

Sure but people seem to have the impression that the “bad things” happen especially in capitalist systems of the west and that other alternate systems like communism would have s different attitude toward the same issues. My experience tells me they had the same attitude but with fewer safeguards and oversight.

Well my view is that both capitalism and communism have these problems, but that other alternate systems (which are neither capitalism or communism) could have better solutions.

Specifically:

- Pure capitalist systems all but rule out strong market regulation. It's not technically incompatible with a market-based system, but in practice people tend to start shouting "but that's not capitalism" as soon as you start proposing regulation as an expected norm as opposed to an unusual exception

- Communist systems all but rule out market-based solutions, which is just dysfunctional as it centralises power too much, and makes it difficult to efficiently distribute resources

I think it's unhelpful (bordering on obtuse) to assume that people criticising capitalism in 2019 are advocating for communism. Very few people would advocate for communism. What people are calling for is:

- A recognition that market failures are not an exception: they are common. And strong regulation is needed to counteract that.

- Large wealth equalities distort markets, and that we need limits on the amount of wealth individuals can control.

That’s a common strategy to defend the status quo and scare people from making Any changes. I think only offering extreme options is especially popular in the US with its two party system. Happens in almost every political discussion.

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