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Comment by sbehlasp | Hacker News Reader

More we move away from nature, more we are getting sick (mentally/physically/psychologically). It is not only air pollution other natural resources like polluted water , contaminated food/veggies [an alarming article i came across (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...)] all are having some or other kind of serious effects on body.

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To take an alternative stance:

People are living longer and better than at any point in history. Nature has its own dangers, we’ve just traded some issues for others.

That's a false dichotomy. We can certainly do better.

I really dislike that term, we can always do better up to some unknown “best”.

But if we’re comparing nature vs now then “what we can do” doesn’t factor because it’s far too unknown and handwavy.

We get all these vehicle-miles-traveled from a desire to stay with nature. That's what the suburban development pattern is all about. Ironically if we just made a clean break with nature and lived in straight-up urban environments, we could have clean air.

But moving in nature is also the worst way to care about it. Living in a dense city us most environmental friendly.

And reducing the human population.

That's not the problem: a Nigerian emits 5% of the carbon footprint of a US person. So they could have 20x as many babies as the Americans? We also have wide differences in the same town and family, too: for instance, my father has emitted at least 20x the CO2 than I did in 2020 (because he like big cars, big houses and fly many times a year).

The problem is clearly what each human being can emit for themselves, according to their means.

That's not really true, more people live longer now that ever in human history. You are making the assumption that people are having more mental health problems now than in the past; but that is just an assumption.

Nodays, more than half of people in developed countries die from diseases cause by their lifestyle.

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