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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change are not all different things.

i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like.

i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of gasoline to mow that lawn every week. nothing better than an insect-less, uniform green lawn!

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Don’t forget that if you don’t saturate your lawn with poison, coat it with industrial fertilizer, water it from depleted aquifers and burn that gasoline to cut it, you run the risk of getting fined or being foreclosed upon.

> you run the risk of getting fined or being foreclosed upon

yes! i was fined because my dandelions crossed the magical 8" threshold for a week a few seasons ago. i happily paid it of course. you see, i had saved up the $20 by then with all the money i didnt spend on weed killer and fertilizer.

i'm just the worst person in my HOA.

the irony, of course, is that immediately behind my 0.2 acre property is a massive wetland with "grass" that's 10-15ft tall.

What is HOA here?

Home Owners Association.

The HOA will pay you a visit at the very least.

Not over-population. Over consumption.

Actually over-production since a lot of food is wasted before consumption.

But why is over-consumption even possible? It's the plentiful cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels that we figured out how to tap into. Once that is gone I am hopeful the next civilization cycle will be more temperate.

More likely once the current civilization’s cheap source of energy is gone, the next civilization will revert to the pre-industrial source of cheap energy: slavery.

Oof, this hurt to read

No it's not, go read the wealth of Nations to understand.

The over production started before we adopted fossil fuels.

Whales made their mistake by being made out of oil.

Any half baked ecologist knows that monoculture farming is the single most damaging thing to the ecosystem that humans have developed. Let’s destroy MASSIVE amounts of land to farm, and the displaced animals will now go to areas they don’t belong, ruin that land, displace those animals, etc.

I heard once in one of my classes that every 1 acre of farmland disrupts 24 acres of adjacent land, not just the surrounding acres but the ones surrounding that!

Meanwhile, global warming is terrible but the world being even 5 degrees hotter doesn’t kill most stuff, but 10b acres of farming can destroy entire continents

> human over-population

in no way is this the root cause, in any real scientific analysis. it is literally just the rallying call of right wing politics.

I'd say it is the root cause, since habitat destruction and pollution have been proportional to population size. If the human pop. hadn't grown geometrically throughout recent history, there almost certainly wouldn't have been the global decimation of wildlife/habitat we have today.

To support such a large population, half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture - that's a shitload of habitat destruction - that's not even accounting for all the rest of the space people use for homes, etc.

You can say this stuff all you want, but not only do the facts not support it but also the analysis of the facts disproves these statements.

> half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture

This is a fact (to some margin of error). It's indisputable that humans require land to produce food through agriculture, and that amount of required land increases with population size. I'm curious what analysis could possibly show human population growth doesn't result in more wildlife habitat destruction.

Since we stopped being hunter-gatherers, we've required agriculture to support large sedentary populations. Land use by humans/wildlife is generally a zero-sum game.

First of all, left-wing politics is the one advocating for less kids.

Elon Musk is like “there’s no problem, guys, keep on having more kids!” and he himself did.

Right wingers are pro life, and many religious ones advocate not even using condoms.

Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.

Anyway, the amount of resources and garbage is proportional to how many humans are on the planet. I don’t see what Elon Musk is so worried about “population collapse”. For an otherwise smart guy, he seems to be very mistaken about this core issue. Maybe he thinks we can escape to Mars and start over LOL

> left-wing politics is the one advocating for less kids.

In no way is this true. No left-wing organization is advocating for this, liberal organizations and activists are.

> Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.

Oh you're one of those people.

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