The estimate is about 200 species go extinct every day from the actions of human beings -- ecosystem destruction, degredation, climate change etc.
We are a meatgrinder to the biosphere.
We are a meatgrinder to the biosphere.
The concept of nature as someone 2000 years ago might have imagined it is consigned to history. There's just spaces between towns.
Hell, I could drop you in a huge wilderness region in my state (Arizona) where you might walk a dozen miles before you encounter a "trail" (loosly defined).
Honestly, I don't know how you could end up with a take like that unless you're a European who hasn't travelled much.
“They’re bringing pollution, they’re bringing Extinction, and some of the I assume might actually enhance the ecosystems they inhabit.”
It’s not such a hard skill. When we see a complex ecosystem is our first instinct to make it better or to exploit and degrade it? Do we even have a metric for what making it better actually means?
Do we even have a way to debate it? Because the whole debate oscillates between destroy(“jobs”) and the minimum (“we need it to survive.”) nobody has the heart actually suggest it might be worth sacrificing anything for just to make it better.
We need more than a utilitarian reason, we should feel pleasure in making nature better the same way we feel pleasure at seeing a well designed race cad like a Ferrari.
There are definitely people that fit this descriptor! Poets, artists, laypeople that are well-attuned. But those are also likely to be the folks already doing relatively less damage compared to the rest of their societal cohort.