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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

I've always found that the concept of natural parks was turned on its head. We basically allow human economic activities everywhere it's physical possible, except in natural parks. It should be the opposite. All of the world's landmasses should be designated as natural parks, except for specially designated "human development areas".

Let's stop trying to preserve patches of the natural world. Let's start constraining human development in space.

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I wish some of the people who down vote this could explain more why. Is it just that they don't like the idea of valuing other life on this planet that highly or that it's not politically feasible because humans are so human-focused?

I did not downvote, but while I too saw this article and thought that we should concentrate population more to allow more nature to be unmanaged, there's also just something incredible impractical about that. Humans aren't just a thinly spread collections of houses, farms, water supplies, electric transmission need to cover a vast area of earth if we're to keep something like our current quality of life and honestly I do value humans above all else. I'd go almost as far as to say all value flows from people. Nature doesn't I think have intrinsic value. Maybe some of the animals that live in it, but certainly not the plants and insects.

Well, it's a nice vision. But we have 7 billion people now. How many of them fit into that vision? Sure, I know, we could fit them all in Texas, but could we also feed them? Provide them with computers? And everything else?

So I think it's being downvoted because it would be anti-human in some concrete ways. I like nature, but how many people are we willing to let starve to preserve nature? How many are we willing to condemn to a life of no economic opportunity?

The proposal sounds good, but the actual practicalities of it are going to cause a lot of human misery, and even death. Fine-sounding "let's do this" proposals that have high human costs tend to get downvotes, since the voters are humans.

It’s fundamentally misanthropic, and the kind viewpoint a rich first world we can hold from the safety of their expensive urban home (while outsourcing out the farming to others).

(I didn’t downvote it though - and I’m actually supportive of substantially expanding nature preserve land area in Earth, but only after we become a multi-planet species)

That's how it's supposed to work in Canada. Most of the land is crown land managed by the government who should carefully manage it but in practice lease it to anyone as long as it brings in money.

Your last point confuses me. The Earth is finite, and space is so big we don't even know if it is finite.

By space I mean terrestrial space, not outer space.

Is that you Char Aznable?

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