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Comment by blix | Hacker News Reader

The point of the article is that the philosophy underpinning eco-conscious modernity, specificially the fundemental separation between "humanity" and "nature," leaves no place for humans who live as a part of nature. In the modern world this concept is almost entirely taken for granted, as most of us spend the vast majority of their lives in artificially constructed environments designed specifically to insulate us to the greatest extent possible from the pulse of nature. This is baked in to both our interpretation of the challenges we face and our proposed solution to these challenges, sometimes with unintended consequences.

This article is an invitation to more closely consider this underpinning philosophy. The tone of your response indicates this maybe isn't so easy and also why it is so important.

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I'm fine with pointing out the negative consequences of environmental actions. It's absurd to think any sincere, and representative, member of the environmental movement is unfamiliar with this (are there nuts and poseurs? sure, but you don't choose the outliers to characterize a group). They fret about this stuff all the time. But it's a completely mundane observation that an action may have undesirable consequences and that not all people will feel the same costs and benefits. This goes under the heading of "externalized costs", which environmentalists talk about All. The. Time.

But this isn't the issue. The issue is this:

> The expansion of the ‘Green New Deal’ and the rise of ‘renewable’ industrial technologies may be the death knell for these archaic and peaceful people.

This is pinning all the woes of a particular marginalized group on the environmental movement. In fact, I think this is inverting responsibility. It's the environmentalists, or the same people under a different label, who are fighting for the Mbuti and the Yanomami and so forth and the anti-environmentalists, or the same people under a different label, who are machine gunning them and stealing their land and resources.

ETA "archaic and peaceful" sounds a bit off if you're writing in 2021 and you actually have the interests of these people at heart. "Archaic" sounds like you're a white savior from 1890 and "peaceful" makes it sound like you're writing for the postcard vendor at a Carnival Cruise port of call. "Look at their quaint grass skirts! Maybe they'll show some of their colorful folkways."

> It's absurd to think any sincere, and representative, member of the environmental movement

This is a powerful no-true-scotsman here. In my experience, the vast majority of people espousing technical solutions to climate change are barely aware of trade-offs if they've considered them at all. Externalized costs are primarily talked about as those imposed by fossil fuels etc. The costs imposed by environmental action itself are not so commonly considered.

> This is pinning all the woes of a particular marginalized group on the environmental movement...

The article simply pointing out that environmentalists aren't really helping here. Increased demand for cobalt and coltan is extremely harmful to certain groups of people who don't have a particularly loud voice in any segment of the environmental movement or the renewable energy industry. No one kills over rocks that have no value. By driving the demand for these minerals, unrest is increased in this region.

It's kinda silly to assume ~all~ environmentalists are fighting for these groups of people when the interests of many segments of the environmental movement are directly opposed to them and the article itself provides examples of environmental groups attacking them. The world is not black-and-white. People with good intentions can harm others.

I don't particularly like language criticisms, but word for word I think there is a lot more meat in your original comment than in this article.

> This is a powerful no-true-scotsman here.

The no-true-scotsman fallacy only applies when an existence proof is sufficient to falsify a statement, not when the question is the central tendency of some group. If you claim "no X is Y", it is sufficient to find an X which is Y, and special pleading when you say the X isn't a true X, implicitly acknowledging your interlocutor has found a counterexample. But when you are make a statement regarding a central tendency -- within Z standard deviations of the mean or some other definition of outlier there are no X which are Y -- then you can't claim the existence of a counterexample is proof of the falsity of the claim. Simply pulling the phrase "no true scotsman" out of your hat isn't a magical incantation that will win the day for you. And adding "powerful" to it doesn't improve its mojo.

As for the rest of it, I'm done.

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